The present invention is related to a vehicle-traveling supporting system capable of supporting traveling of a vehicle, while information is mutually exchanged between a vehicle-sided traveling supporting apparatus mounted on the vehicle and a road-sided traveling supporting apparatus provided on the side of a road.
In general, the technique capable of supporting the traveling of the vehicle is well known in the field, while information is mutually exchanged or communicated between the vehicle-sided traveling supporting apparatus mounted on the vehicle and the road-sided traveling supporting apparatus provided on the side of the road. The supporting technique is described in, for example, JP-A-11-3499. It should be noted that the vehicle-sided traveling supporting apparatus may also be referred to as an xe2x80x9con-vehicle apparatusxe2x80x9d, whereas the road-sided traveling supporting apparatus may also be referred to as a xe2x80x9croad-sided apparatus.xe2x80x9d
Conventionally, in order to effectively support the traveling of the vehicle and to perform the automatic driving operation of the vehicle in a high efficiency, the position of the vehicle is required to be detected in high precision and furthermore in real time (namely, minimum delay time). To this end, in the conventional vehicle-traveling supporting system described in JP-A-11-3499, the positional detection is carried out by combining the relative positional relationship between the own vehicle and other vehicles or the positional relationship between the own vehicle and the fixed object which is detected by the own vehicle, and the vehicle position detected by the road-sided apparatus.
Also, with respect to the automatic driving operation of the vehicle, in particular, in view of improvements in safety drive aspects, the manipulation (operation) amounts (namely, open degree of accelerator, steering angle, braking amount and so forth) of the vehicle driver, the instruction values by the vehicle control functions, and the detection values of the vehicle behaviors by the sensors are employed. As a result, the various detecting means capable of detecting the above-explained information are provided with the on-vehicle apparatus.
As explained above, in order that the automatic driving operation of the vehicle and the vehicle-traveling supporting operation are performed by accepting the support made by the road-sided apparatus, the following information may constitute the very important factors. That is, the precise information related to the position of the own vehicle and also to the behavior of the own vehicle is acquired, the obstacles and the road surface conditions are precisely detected in order to judge dangerous situations, and the information is communicated between the on-vehicle apparatus and the road-sided apparatus.
As a concrete example of the vehicle-traveling support by the road-sided apparatus, the road-sided apparatus may warn the dangerous situations to the vehicle, for example, a vehicle having dangerous speeds and behaviors enter into and also the obstacles existed in the curved road portion and the crossing road where the driver of the vehicle cannot see far ahead, or the vehicle sensor cannot observe them.
When the above-described warning operation is performed, both the positions and the behaviors of the own vehicle must be detected in such a precision level minuter than, or equal to the precision level at which the dangerous situation can be judged. Also, the obstacle having such a size larger than, or equal to the size by which the vehicle driving operation is disturbed, and positioned ahead must be detected. Further, the information related to this obstacle is required to be notified as the warning information or the instruction to the vehicle driver.
In the conventional vehicle-traveling supporting system, the vehicle conditions such as the vehicle position, the manipulation amount, and the vehicle behavior must be acquired in higher precision. When the vehicle condition detected by the on-vehicle apparatus is compared with the vehicle condition detected by the road-sided apparatus, the vehicle condition can be detected by the on-vehicle condition in a higher efficiency and higher precision up to now unless both the detected vehicle conditions are combined with each other so as to be corrected.
For example, the continuous communication technique such as the LCX (leakage type wireless technique) owns the following problems. That is, since the facilities are networked over the entire portion of the infrastructure, the huge amounts of facilities are necessarily required. Also, vehicles driven on the intermediate lane within the three or more lanes can be hardly detected. In other words, the high facility investment cost is required and the functional satisfaction cannot be achieved. Also, the GPS navigation system is required to be necessarily combined with other detecting means for detecting the present position of the vehicle at such a difficult positional detecting place as a tunnel, and also means for interpolating time data.
As to the detecting means provided with the on-vehicle apparatus, the detection information may be relatively easily acquired in high precision, for instance, a white lane line is recognized and also a road constructive object is detected by an infrared laser. Namely, these detecting means are practically available up to now.
Also, such information which cannot be detected by the road-sided apparatus may be involved in information which is detected by the on-vehicle apparatus. Concretely speaking, as to this information, there are an instruction value instructed to an actuator of an apparatus provided on a vehicle, and a very small manipulation amount which cannot appear as the vehicle behavior. With respect to the instruction value for instructing the actuator, the behavior of the vehicle may appear as a result obtained by combining this manipulation amount with the instruction given to the actuator. Accordingly, the road-sided apparatus cannot acquire both the manipulation amount and the instruction value given to the actuator only from this behavior.
Furthermore, it is so conceivable that a very small behavior amount which cannot appear in a behavior is located within a very fine error range as control functions with respect to the automatic control of the vehicle and the traveling support of the vehicle. However, such a very small manipulation amount may constitute important information used to predict the intention of the vehicle driver and the situation of the vehicle driver.
For instance, considering now that the vehicle driver sets his foot on the braking pedal of the vehicle due to a certain factor, and manipulates this braking pedal with such a very small manipulation amount which cannot be detected as the actual braking operation, this fact may be understood as follows. That is, the vehicle driver may feel a dangerous situation and thus may prepare a danger avoiding action, for example, the deceleration of the vehicle speed and/or stopping of the vehicle. Also, such an action that the vehicle driver leaves his foot from the accelerator pedal to set the open degree to a zero value may not always immediately appear as the vehicle behavior. Similarly, it is predictable that the vehicle driver may feel dangerous situations and may perform such a preparation operation required for right-turn/left-turn operations in the next drive stage.
On the other hand, as information detectable from the road-sided apparatus, for instance, there are the macro information about a certain wide range which generally has temporal margin, such as information related to macro traffic streams and a traffic jam (traffic congestion) condition and presence/absence of an obstacle located ahead along a traveling road which cannot be detected by the on-vehicle apparatus; and information which is produced/managed by a system provided on the road side of infrastructure such as regulation information, and so forth.
In order to perform the vehicle-traveling supporting operation between the road-sided apparatus and the on-vehicle apparatus, it is effective to execute a process operation for combining information as to nature owned by only one party with each other.
As previously explained, as to the vehicle condition information related to the position and behavior of the vehicle, such information detected by the on-vehicle apparatus may have the highest precision and also the superior information amount. Also, since the detection by the sensors mounted on the vehicle cannot perform at the obstructed view place or at the hidden place by another vehicle, the ahead obstacles or the dropped objects which are required to judge as to whether or not they are dangerous must be detected by the road-sided apparatus.
With respect to the vehicle condition information such as the positions and behaviors of other vehicles, when the vehicle condition information detected by the own vehicle is used, this vehicle condition information is required to be communicated between the own vehicle and other vehicles located around the own vehicle. Also, this mutual communication case, it is practically difficult to communicate such vehicle condition information among these vehicles located at such a place where the vehicle driver cannot see ahead along the traveling road, or a place shadowed by another vehicle.
As a consequence, when a warning system for warning a dangerous situation occurred ahead at the obstructed view place or at the crossroad is constructed, the following system operation may become effective. That is, as to the positions and behaviors of the other vehicles, the vehicle condition information detected by the on-vehicle apparatus is transferred to the road-sided apparatus. In the road-sided apparatus, the process operation which judges the ahead dangerous situation to the own vehicle is carried out by combining the information about the obstacles or the like with the vehicle condition information related to the positions and behaviors of the respective vehicles which is transmitted by the communication channel. When the road-sided apparatus judges that the dangerous situation occurs, this road-sided apparatus may warn this dangerous situation to either the vehicle or the vehicle driver.
As previously described, in order to support the traveling of the vehicle while the information is communicated between the vehicle-sided traveling supporting apparatus (on-vehicle apparatus) and the road-sided traveling supporting apparatus (road-sided apparatus), a total amount of communication information transmitted between the both apparatuses would be required to be reduced so as to increase the supporting efficiency.
The present invention has been made to solve the above-described problems, and therefore, has an object to provide a vehicle-traveling supporting system capable of supporting the traveling operation of the vehicle, while information is effectively communicated between the on-vehicle apparatus and the road-sided apparatus.
The feature of the present invention is the following. Traveling difference information between first traveling condition prediction information of a vehicle, which is predicted based upon map information and vehicle traveling model information, and traveling actual-results information judged based upon sensor information of the vehicle is obtained. Second traveling condition prediction information of the vehicle predicted based upon the same map information and the same vehicle traveling model information is obtained. A vehicle traveling condition for the next travel operation is predicted based upon corrected traveling condition prediction information that is obtained by correcting this second traveling condition prediction information with the traveling difference information.
In the present invention, the traveling difference information is transmitted from the on-vehicle apparatus to the road-sided apparatus by communication only when there is the traveling difference information between the traveling actual-results information and the traveling condition prediction information of the vehicle. As a consequence, the information communication can be carried out only when the traveling difference information is present, and furthermore, only the traveling difference information may be communicated between the on-vehicle apparatus and the road-sided apparatus, so that a total amount of communication information can be reduced. As a result, the information communication between the on-vehicle apparatus and the road-side apparatus can be carried out in a higher efficiency.